How athenahealth looks to reach specialists with new solutions

Physicians in some specialties find it difficult to get what they need out of electronic health records, Nele Jessel says.

Nele Jessel, chief medical officer of athenahealth, discussed the company's new tailored solutions aimed at specialists, urgent care and women's health.

Jessel is the chief medical officer at athenahealth, which offers electronic health records systems to providers across the country. The Boston-based company has launched new solutions aimed at specialists, with products designed for urgent care and women’s health.

Jessel says the new offerings are designed to address the growing complexities of healthcare, especially as more work shifts to outpatient sites.

“We've always supported most specialties to varying degrees. It has become clear to us based on the insights from our large networks of customers, that it is very important to them that we support those specialties and care sites, even more so than we already did, because of that increasing complexity in healthcare,” Jessel tells Chief Healthcare Executive®.

She also says specialists have provided feedback that their electronic health record systems aren’t easy to utilize for their needs.

“We have heard, especially from specialty clinicians, there's just too much data. ‘I’ve got to hunt and peck for what I need … you're not accommodating my specialty specific workflows very well,’” she says.

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In May, athenahealth launched athenaOne for Women’s Health and athenaOne for Urgent Care, as part of their efforts to offer more tailored products. The company is also planning to offer a solution aimed at behavioral health.

Jessel says the company is aiming to expand the utilization of electronic health records.

“We believe that an EHR in today's world has to be so much more than the clinical documentation solution,” Jessel says. “In order to truly deliver optimal care, you have to be part of a network. You have to be part of a connected ecosystem. You have to have capabilities that go far beyond clinical documentation.

“And that's where we at athenahealth, truly believe that bringing tailored specialty specific workflows to the table allows the best of both worlds, so you can add specialty-specific workflows and still have the power that a large-scale, generalist EHR can bring to the table.”

Jessel says the company is on a mission to “cure complexity.”

“We want to simplify the practice of healthcare as much as possible and do a lot of the work that our customers and practices are doing today, so they can focus on what they do best at, delivering care and taking care of patients,” Jessel says. The company is aiming to show it’ll help customers succeed from a clinical standpoint and financially as well, she adds.

Jessel notes that primary care physicians and specialists use electronic health records differently. A primary care doctor may need a great deal of data in the record because they “know a little about a lot,” as Jessel says. Specialists may not need all that data, but the information they need is very specific.

The company’s tailored solution for urgent care reflects the popularity of those facilities, and the desire of more health systems to help patients avoid unnecessary hospital visits, Jessel says.

“Medicine is increasingly shifting to the ambulatory care market and payment models are starting to evolve,” Jessel says. “And it becomes vital, both on behalf of our patients that we serve as well as our network of physicians and practices, that we support those care delivery models who really helped keep patients healthy and out of the hospital.”

Jessel says with a laugh that she hopes the need for tailored solutions for women’s health is rather obvious. But she notes that providers have taken more comprehensive approaches to women’s health.

“There's many adjacent needs to obstetric services and gynecological services: menopausal care, fertility treatments, maternal fetal medicine and the list goes on and on and on,” she says. “So that's why we're trying to be much more inclusive.”

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With its specialty solutions, athenahealth’s approach is aimed at “cutting through the noise” and building for the nuances of specialties, Jessel says.

“We really need to leverage technology to reduce that complexity and bring the joy back to healthcare, and really enable clinicians and clinical staff to focus back on patient care,” Jessel says. “And I think the more we can optimize the technology to work with them, for them and not against them, the better. And tailorable workflows are definitely one of those ways we can do this.”

Jessel acknowledges some clinicians have their frustrations with electronic health records. But she says those digital tools offer big advantages for patient care, and not the least of which is that physicians don’t have to spend time trying to decipher another colleague’s handwriting on paper records.

But she adds that the company’s new specialty-oriented solutions are aimed at helping clinicians make the most out of their electronic records to improve care and, hopefully, make their own work a little easier.

“You have to meet clinicians where they are and offer solutions that are tailorable to their workflows to the individual needs, because even within the same specialty, no two clinicians work exactly the same,” Jessel says. “You can go to a practice of all orthopedic surgeons and they will all do something different. So we've definitely learned that it's important to accommodate that variability in how clinicians like to work.”